Guy and Pauline Part 41

"I've never been angry with her except on your account."

"But you won't ever be again, because I'm so foolish. I'm really a sort of young Miss Verney."

They laughed at this idea of Pauline's, and soon it was time for Guy to go. He thought luxuriously as he walked up the drive how large a measure of good news he would bring back with him from London.

Guy was surprized to be kept waiting when he enquired for Mr. Worrall at three o'clock on the following afternoon. All the way up in the train he had thought so much about him and so kindlily that it seemed he must the very moment he entered the dusty Georgian antechamber shake his publisher warmly by the hand. He had pictured him really as looking out for his coming, almost as vividly indeed in his prefiguration of the scene as to behold Mr. Worrall's face pressed tight against a pane and thence disappearing to greet him from the step.

It was a shock to be invited to wait, and he repeated his name to the indifferent clerk a little insistently.

"Mr. Worrall will see you in a minute," the clerk repeated.

Guy looked at the few objects of interest in the outer office, at the original drawings of wrappers and frontispieces, at the signed photograph of a moderately distinguished poet of the 'nineties, at a depressing acc.u.mulation of still unsold volumes. The window was grimy, and the raindrops seemed from inside to smear it as tears smudge the face of a dirty child. The clerk pored over a ledger, and from the grey afternoon the cries of the porters in Covent Garden came drearily in. At last a bell sounded, and the clerk invited him 'to step this way,'

lifting the counter and pointing up a narrow staircase beyond a gla.s.s door. Guy went up and at last entered Mr. Worrall's private office.

The publisher was a short fat man with a bald and curiously conical head, reminding Guy very much of a dentist in his manner. The poet sat down and immediately caught in his first survey Mr. William Worrall's caricature by Max Beerbohm. As a result of this observation Guy throughout the interview could only perceive Mr. Worrall as the caricaturist had perceived him, and like a shape in a dream his head all the time grew more and more conical, until it seemed as if it would soon bore a hole in the festooned ceiling.

"Well, Mr. Hazlewood," said the publisher referring as he spoke to Guy's card with what Guy thought was a rather unnecessary implication of oblivion. "Well, Mr. Hazlewood, my reader reports very favourably on your poems, and there seems no reason why I should not publish them."

Guy bowed.

"No reason at all," Mr. Worrall continued. Then making a gothic arch with his fingers and looking up at the ceiling, he added:

"Though, of course, there will be a risk. However, my reader's opinion was certainly favourable."

And so it ought to be, thought Guy, for a guinea.

"And I don't think," Mr. Worrall went on, "that in the circ.u.mstances we need be very much afraid. Have you any ideas about the price at which your sheaf, your little harvest is to be offered to the public?"

"Oh, I should leave that to you," said Guy hastily.

"Precisely," said the publisher. "Yes, I think perhaps we might say five s.h.i.+llings or ... of course it might be done in paper in the Covent Garden Series of Modern English Poets. Yes, the reader speaks most highly of your work. You know the Covent Garden series of modern poets?

In paper at half-a-crown net?"

"I should be very proud to appear in such a series," said Guy pleasantly. The series as a matter of fact was one that could do him no discredit.

"It's a charming idea, isn't it?" said Mr. Worrall, fondling one of the set that lay on his desk. "Every five volumes has its own floral emblem.

We've done The Rose, The Lily, The Violet. Let me see, your poems are mostly about London, aren't they?"

"No, there isn't one about London," Guy pointed out rather sharply.

"No, precisely, then of course they would not come in The London Pride set which still has a vacancy. Perhaps The Cowslip? What does the reader say? Um, yes, pastoral. Precisely! Well, then why not let us decide that your poems shall be Number Three in The Cowslip set. Capital! I think you'd be wise to choose the Covent Garden series in paper. The cost of publication is really less in that series, and I have always chosen my poets so carefully that I can be sure the Press will pay attention to--er neophytes. That is a great advantage for a young writer, as you no doubt realize without my telling you?"

"The cost?" echoed Guy in a puzzled voice.

"It will run you in for about 30--as a guarantee of course. The terms I suggest are simply a written agreement that you will guarantee 30 toward the cost. Your royalty to be ten per cent on the first thousand, twelve and a half on the next thousand and fifteen over two thousand. We might fairly say that in the event of selling a thousand you would have nothing to pay, but of course if you only sell twenty or thirty, you will have to--er--pay for your piping."

"And when should I have to produce this 30?" Guy asked.

"Well, I might ask for a cheque to be placed to my account on the day of publication; and then of course I should send in a written statement twice a year with the usual three months' margin for settlement."

"So that supposing my book came out in March?" Guy enquired.

"By the following November I should hope to have the pleasure of sending you back your 30 and a cheque on account of royalties," said the publisher briskly.

"They don't seem very good terms somehow," said Guy.

Mr. Worrall shrugged his shoulders, and his conical head grew more conical.

"You forget the advantage of being in the Covent Garden series of modern poets. However, don't, pray do not, entrust your ma.n.u.script to my pilotage unless you are perfectly satisfied. I have a good many poems to consider, you know."

"May I write within a week or so and give you my decision?" Guy asked.

"Naturally."

"Well, good-bye."

"Good-bye, Mr. Hazlewood. Clever fellow, isn't he?"

Guy had given a farewell glance at Max Beerbohm's caricature.

"Very clever," the poet fervently agreed.

Guy left Mr. William Worrall's office and wandered dismally across Covent Garden, wondering where on earth he was going to be able to raise 30. He had intended to spend the night in town and look up some old friends, but foreseeing now the inevitable question 'What are you doing?' he felt he had not the heart to explain that at present he was debating the possibility of spending 30 in order to produce a book of poems. All the people whom he would have been glad to see had held such high hopes of him at Oxford, had prophesied for his career such prosperity; and now when after fifteen months he emerged from his retirement it was but to pay a man to include him in the Covent Garden series of modern poets. The rain came down faster, and a creeping fog made more inhospitable the dusk of London. He thought of a quick train somewhere about five o'clock, and in a sudden longing to be back in the country and to sleep, however dark and frore the January night that stretched between them, nearer to Pauline than here in this city of drizzled fog, he took a cab to Paddington.

During the railway journey Guy contemplated various plans to raise the money he wanted. He knew that his father at the cost of a long letter would probably have given him the sum: but supposing a triumph lay before him, all the sweets of it would have been robbed by paternal help. Moreover if the book were paid for thus, there would be a consequent suspicion of all favourable criticism: it would never seem a genuine book to his father, and the reviews would give him the impression of being the work of well-disposed amateurs or of personal friends. There was the alternative of borrowing the money from Michael Fane; and then as the train went clanging through the night Guy made up his mind to be under an obligation to n.o.body and to sacrifice all the rest of his books if necessary that this new book might be born.

When he was back at Plashers Mead, his resolution did not weaken: coldly and unsentimentally he began to eviscerate the already mutilated library. At the end of his task he had stacked upon the floor five hundred volumes to be offered as a bargain to the bookseller who had bought the others. All that was left indeed were the cheapest and most ordinary editions of poets, one or two volumes of the greatest of all like Rabelais and Cervantes, and the eternally read and most companionable like Boswell and Gilbert White and Sir Thomas Browne. In the determination that had seized him he rejoiced in his bare shelves, so much exalted by the glories of abnegation that he began to despise himself in his former att.i.tude as a trifler among books and to say to himself, as he looked at the volumes which had survived this heartless clearance, that now he was set on the great fairway of literature without any temptation to diverge up the narrow streams of personal taste. The bookseller's a.s.sistant was not at all eager for the proferred bargain, and in the end Guy could only manage to obtain the 30 and not, as he had hoped, another 10 towards his debts. Nevertheless he locked the cheque up in his desk with the satisfaction of a man who for the first time in his life earns money, and later on went across to tell Pauline the result of the visit to London.

There was a smell of frost in the air that afternoon, and the sharpness of the weather consorted well with Guy's mood, taking away the heavy sense of disappointment and giving him a sparkling hopefulness. He and Pauline went for a walk on Wychford down, and in the wintry cheer he would not allow her to be cast down at the loss of his books or to resent Worrall's reception of the poems.

"Everything is all right," he a.s.sured her. "The more we have to deny ourselves now, the greater will be my success when it comes. The law of compensation never fails. You and I are Davidsbundler marching against the Philistines. So be brave, my Pauline."

"I will try to be brave," she promised. "But it's harder for me because I'm doing nothing."

"Oh, nothing," said Guy. "Nothing except endow me with pa.s.sion and ambition, with consolation ... oh, nothing, you foolish one."

"Am I really all that to you?"

"Forward," he shouted, hurling his stick in front of him and dragging Pauline at the heels of Bob across turf that was already beginning to crackle in the frost. Pauline could not resist his confidence, and when at last they had to turn round and leave a smoky orange sunset, they came home glowing to the Rectory, both in the highest spirits. Guy wrote to the publisher that night and announced his intention of accepting the "offer," a word which he could not resist framing with inverted commas in case the sarcastic shaft might pierce Mr. Worrall's hard and conical head.

Sitting back in his chair and thinking over his poems, all sorts of verbal improvements suggested themselves to Guy; and he added a note asking for the ma.n.u.script to be sent back for a few corrections. He looked at his work with new eyes when it arrived, and bent with all the enthusiasm that fruition gave his pen upon reviewing each line for the hundredth time. He had enjoyed few things so well in his life as going to bed tired with the intense consideration of a rhyme and falling asleep in the ambition to reconsider it early next morning.

About ten days had pa.s.sed since Guy sold the second lot of books, and the poems were now as good as he could make them until print should reveal numbers of fresh faults. He hoped that Worrall would hurry on with the printing in order to allow him plenty of time for an even more severe scrutiny; and he wrote to suggest April as the month of publication, so anxious was he to have one specially bound copy to offer Pauline on her birthday.

On the very morning when the ma.n.u.script had been wrapped up and was ready to be sent off a disturbing letter arrived from Lampard, his favourite Oxford bookseller, to say that having made a purchase of books two or three days ago he had been surprized to find among them a large number of volumes with Mr. Hazlewood's name inscribed on the fly-leaves, for which Mr. Hazlewood had not yet paid him. He ventured to think it was only by an oversight that Mr. Hazlewood had not paid his long outstanding account before disposing of the books and in short he was anxious to know what Mr. Hazlewood intended to do about it. His bill, 32 15s., was enclosed. Guy wrote back to say that it was indeed a most unaccountable oversight on his part, but that he hoped in order to mark his sympathy with Mr. Lampard's point of view to send him another cheque very shortly, reminding the bookseller at the same time that he had scarcely three weeks ago sent him 7 on account. Mr. Lampard in his reply observed very plainly that Guy's letter was no reply at all and threatened politely to make matters rather unpleasant if the bill were not paid in full instantly. Guy tried once more a letter full of bland promises, and received in response a letter from Mr. Lampard's solicitor. The 30 intended for Mr. Worrall had to be sacrificed, and even 2 15s. had to be taken from his current account. Savagely he tore the paper from the ma.n.u.script, wrapped it up again and despatched it to another publisher. The bad luck of the Lampard business made him only the more resolute not to invoke aid from his father or anyone else. He was a prey to a perverse determination to do everything himself; but it was gloomy news that he had to tell Pauline that afternoon, and she broke down and cried in her disappointment.